Sunday, March 3rd: ‘Metropolitan Avenue’ with Christine Noschese

“Metropolitan Avenue probably touches on every problem that every urban neighborhood has either gone through or will face. … Christine Noschese, the show’s producer and director and a former Brooklynite who delivers the narration, expresses a point of view, focusing on the women of the diverse ethnic communities. She documents, through interviews, their strength, individually and collectively, and their persistence.

The neighborhood’s problems are almost textbookish in their content. In the 1950′s, the elevated highway split it in half. In the 1960′s, a new housing project brought 900 families, most of them black, into a community long settled by Italian-Americans who lived in neat private houses. In other situations, a manufacturer of boxes receives the go-ahead to demolish homes to make way for its new plant, and the local police station is threatened with closing.

It was these sorts of problems that injected a previously unknown sense of activism into the lives of the people of the neighborhood. Anger at decisions made by faraway forces grips the residents and bridges are built between black and white. Surprising and beneficial results ensue.”